With the addition of variables, multiple button actions and advanced actions to Adobe Captivate 4, there is no limit to Captivate's abilities. Okay, maybe the possibilities aren't endless, but you can certainly do some pretty cool things with Captivate 4.
Have you ever wished that you could display the Captivate playbar, or not, depending on which slide is shown? That's an easy thing to do via the System variables. In the Properties of the slide, set the On Enter field to cpShowPlayBar to 1 (meaning YES) or 0 (meaning NO) to display or hide the playbar. Cool!
What about keeping track of how many times a customer selected a certain action? You can do that too by creating your own user variable via the Actions Dialog box and increment it when necessary. For example, you can count the number of times buttons are pushed in the lesson. Create a variable called ButtonPushTotal and set the On Success field of each button push to Increment ButtonPushTotal.
Ever wanted to do more than one thing based on a single customer action (such as count button pushes AND jump to a new slide upon clicking a clickbox)? Well now you can with the multiple action capability. Simply change the On Success action to Multiple Actions, select Increment and then select Jump to Slide. When the customer clicks, both actions will occur.
Multiple actions are a powerful tool, but when you need more, look to ActionScripting. Let's say you want to create some interactive navigation. Something of the type that IF the user does action A, go to slide A but if the user does action B, go to slide B and once all necessary actions are complete, go to a quiz slide. Before Advanced Actions, this type of behavior would require many duplicate slides and a large and possibly complicated lesson. Now, it can be done by using one single slide, some variables and an action script. Click here to watch a demonstration of this concept.
Those of you who have completed our Captivate 4: Beyond the Essentials class got a little taste of actions. But there are many other things that can be done via actions. Do you have something you wish Captivate could do? Do you have a cool idea for an action, but aren't sure how to write it? Send your ideas to me. I am in the planning phase of a new online course for IconLogic dedicated to teaching you how to create advanced actions in Captivate. If I use your idea in the class, you will be eligible to take the class for free!
Worried about your class canceling? You'll be happy to hear that we never, ever cancel our classes (even if there's just one student registered).
About the author: Lori Smith is IconLogic's lead programmer and veteran Captivate developer. Lori holds a Bachelors degree from MIT and a Masters from George Mason University. She has been working in the field of software engineering for more than 20 years.